Because Every Picture Tells a Story
by theaverys
Summary: Future-based story about Chuck's journey to forgiving his father. Only slightly AU (Bart only dies the first time). CB.


**Hi there! This is a one-shot which takes place about twenty years after Bart died (the first time lol). Bart doesn't come back in this AU. Some of the details have changed and I'm not being a stickler for the timeline per say so please don't crucify me over it lol. **

**I was watching the episode of Serena's car crash, with Chuck and Blair's infamous hospital hallway scene. It stuck out to me more than usual where he asks if Serena is ok, then if Lily and Eric were ok. I realized at that point I wanted to write a short fanfic about that dynamic. There are a few lines of dialogue taken from that scene only for purposes of the story. Disclaimer: I don't own that dialogue, the story, the characters or anything else related to Gossip Girl but I hope you like it!**

Twenty years since Bart Bass's cold body was rolled out of the hospital in a body bag and he still wasn't able to let it go. He wasn't able to let his childhood go. He wasn't able to let his hatred for the man he called his father all those years go, no matter how hard he tried. He just couldn't seem to forgive and move on.

Ten years of psychoanalysis, of secret meetings on his makeshift lunch hours and evening calls to his therapist to help him move on. Even after ten years of being through therapy he still wasn't able to forgive. His therapist had a framed picture covering a small corner of a wall in his office. It said, "Your wound is probably not your fault, but your healing is your responsibility".

It wasn't a daily fight because not all days were bad. It was just the bad days which were difficult and self-destructive for him. It was days like when a huge deal fell through and he thought of Bart's disappointment, or like today when his mind was heavily on his father and his childhood. The emotional days he still didn't know how to process were the toughest. He had never truly forgave his father.

Chuck had been having his days since he was eleven years old. When a bad day didn't end with a fist through a wall or door slammed like most people's bad days, but instead with a belly full of aged brown whiskey and a few white lines. His bad days always seemed to end on the side of complete and utter annihilation. The only thing that had changed since marrying Blair and becoming a father to Henry were the women on those bad days. He at least never even dreamt of reverting back to the women. The booze was always a different story.

He sat in his office at work, well past nine o'clock. The city was dark and his office was dim, a table lamp near the door being its only source of illumination. The raindrops were falling down at a fair but steady pace and it was the making of a perfect storm.

His normal tumbler of scotch sat empty and across from him near the full decanter. He hadn't had a drop all day. Maybe this was growth for him. Strength as he may, he still didn't have what he needed to go home and be a good father to Henry and husband to Blair yet. He couldn't face them.

_Buzzz_. His phone lit up, no doubt his worried wife again wondering where he was. His assistant was long gone and so was everyone else at Bass Industries. He was in the most predictable place he could be but still off the map.

He sprawled back on the couch normally reserved for visitors or maybe just decoration because he couldn't remember the last time anyone else had made use of it. His thoughts went back to his tenth birthday.

Besides one, there wasn't another time during Bart's life he could remember them celebrating his birthday or it even getting an honorable mention. His father had made sure of that. So did his mother and _the incident_. His friends never knew when it was, he knew better than to ever bring it up. His birthday was one of the most taboo subjects of the Upper East Side.

"_Master Charles, get ready. We have an errand to run." She grinned and motioned to the elevator. He never ran errands with the staff. He never really was regarded by the staff. Nanny's never knew how to handle him or what to give him other than space and anything he wanted. He never had his own Dorota. _

_A quick walk down the block, around the back of a smelly cafe and down a few dark stairs led them straight to a dim bakery. It was quaint, quiet and smelled like butter and sugar and everything else that might stop a heart. Music he would recall hearing slowly coming out of an old wooden music box he recalled owning played over the speakers. It was a small, Russian bakery. _

_He still hadn't said a word, just peered up at the woman who he had vaguely spoken to throughout his childhood. There was a language barrier because she spoke Russian and almost no English and never had. The cashier came quickly around the register. _

_In a heavily masked accent himself he spoke to the boy. "Charles Bass, we heard today is your birthday." _

_His birthday? How did they know? How did anyone know? He nodded quietly toward the older man, unsure of what else to say. He was led to a table in the back corner that was adorned with a few Happy Birthday balloons and what he didn't know at the time to be Russian birthday cake. It was a sliver of cake made of what he could count to be a thousand layers and a golden brown color. _

"_Sit, sit young man." The gray man chuckled and pulled out a chair. His nanny pulled out both chairs across from him and yelled something he didn't understand toward the bck door. A young girl and a young boy ran out to sit with him. They were no more than a year or two younger._

_They lit a lone candle on the cake that somehow managed to illuminate the dark bakery on its own. With a big whisk of his hands the man started what he could only figure to be a Russian Happy Birthday song that they all sang toward him in harmony. For a minute, just one minute, he felt like he had a family. This dark and maybe even eerie cafe, surrounded by people he didn't know, singing a song in a language he couldn't understand with a dessert he couldn't familiarize with had been the best and happiest day of his life. _

The nanny was fired the next day when Bart found out about their adventure. He yelled loud enough for Chuck to hear him whether it was purposeful or not. See, his father just couldn't have help around he couldn't trust to take orders and that's all that it came down to. Word had gotten back to him. They had one order that day, that day was to be treated as any other day.

The bakery didn't stay open for much longer and the memory was nothing more than that to him. Later in life he had found the cake to be Honey Cake, rich in Russian culture as a birthday cake and a delicacy by many. It was the only birthday tradition he had. He always found a piece on his birthday and was blissfully transported back to the day he felt...loved and celebrated.

_Buzzz_. It was Blair again and he wasn't ready to go home. A few more minutes and he would leave, once he was sure she had Henry to bed and was close to sleeping herself. He could start fresh tomorrow.

His piece of Honey Cake was gone and the takeout box scraped clean. The cake warmed his insides and stuck right to his heart.

"Sweetheart, where is your phone?" Blair asked, vaguely knocking and coming in. She made herself a makeshift seat next to him as he sprawled across his stiff office couch. He looked to the table where his phone sat next to the takeout box, blinking wildly, no doubt from her string of missed calls and messages.

She let out a breath that she didn't realize she'd been holding. While in her mind she knew what the day was and what it did to him, she ultimately thought he'd be home by now. So when he wasn't she left Henry with Dorota and called Arthur to take her to BI. She knew he had never quite been able to make it through his birthday without being flooded with thoughts of Bart. She never expected to see much of him on this day and that was just the way he was.

Next to his phone she saw a birthday card from Lily and a framed picture. It was Lily, Serena, Eric and Chuck around the breakfast table in her apartment. By the looks of everyone in the photo, Blair quickly placed it around their senior year of high school and a year or two after Bart's death.

Chuck wore what she saw to be a genuine smile, something she had rarely seen on him at that time and seen photographed even less. He sat between Lily and Eric and across from Serena. Serena's head was thrown back and you could almost hear the belly laugh erupting from her, if you weren't sure then you could tell by the grin Eric was throwing her. Chuck was facing the photographer and Lily's focus was on Chuck. She had a happy and complacent smile on her face. Blair couldn't help but witness the love written all over her face.

"You thinking about Bart?" She asked her husband, slowly pushing his messy hair back to where it belonged on his head. She already knew the answer.

He shrugged. "I try not to."

She had to hand it to him. While he was still as forlorn as ever on this day, he wasn't the same Chuck. He didn't look unhealthy. He wasn't heavily medicated. He just looked tired, like he couldn't stop running from the emotions of his past with his father no matter how desperately he needed to. Still, in his tired and dejected state, he was more of a man than Bart ever was.

She nodded, wanting to let him guide the conversation at his own level of comfort. After all the years she had learned moved on his own terms. "I have to forgive a person who wasn't even sorry Blair."

He had been trying for so long and truly had made growth that had stunned and impressed her. He wasn't trying to forgive Bart and move on for Bart's sake, but for himself and for his family.

Bart wasn't sorry, Bart would never apologize for a single decision he made or thing he said but Blair knew there was something Chuck was missing. Something she and everyone else knew but him.

She best gift she could give him was the truth he had never found himself. "Don't you see that Bart married Lily because of you? Bart married Lily for you." She whispered to him as if she were letting him in on some sort of top government secret.

He looked at his maturing wife like she had two heads. "Huh?"

She nodded earnestly. "Bart knew Lily was in love with Rufus. Everyone did. She never loved him and I know he sure as hell never loved her. Lily married Bart because...she's Lily".

Chuck didn't see where she was going with this. Her two heads grew to three. He couldn't figure out why his wife was trying to destroy the one good woman in his life besides her. She went on, "You know I love Lily and I always have but she's a socialite. Always has been and always will be".

Blair sighed. "Your dad married Lily because he knew she would grow to love you. He knew that she would give you everything you needed whether you wanted it or not. He knew she would give you everything he couldn't."

Lily was never the model of maternal instincts but as far as maternal figures on the Upper East Side, she was hard to beat. She was the best mother figure he could give Chuck without disrupting their lives.

Bart was a realist. He was still going to be Bart and she was still going to be Lily. Chuck needed someone to love him in a way Bart knew he'd never be capable of. It was the best deal he'd ever brokered. Even if Lily had unknowingly entered into it. She entered in for status and came out widow with a broken, seventeen year old son.

"Bart gave you a mother." Blair shrugged at him and smiled. It was the secret everyone was in on but him. To everyone else it couldn't have been more obvious. He recalled running in to the hospital that final night to see his father's last few breaths.

_He wandered aimlessly through the bright hallways of Lenox Hill Hospital. Bart was behind one of those doors and once he found him everything would change. Serena came rushing through a set of doors, her face relieved for once to find him nearby. "What are you doing out here? Come on." She ushered him around the corner toward a large suite at the end of the hall. _

_Bart laid completely motionless and prone on the bed with Lily sympathetically gazing down at him. She felt his presence in the room and the heavy weighted emotional scene that was before her. It was a boy losing his father. "Charles, the doctors say there's nothing more they can do."_

_Delivering that news to him was easily the most painful moment of her life, no matter his relationship with his father. "We have to let him go"._

_He took a deep breath, pushing the contents of anything possibly in his stomach back down. A moment he'd secretly been hoping for all his life had arrived and he wasn't ready. He couldn't get out of the room fast enough._

_Serena reached toward him, softly trying to pull him back into the room. "Stay, stay here with us" he begged. It was the last clear thought he had until coming back from Thailand._

The glow of the newly framed photo recaptured their attention, because every picture tells a story. It was his family, the family Bart was never truly a part of but was all because of him. Tonight was the night he finally forgave Bart Bass.

**I'd love to hear your thoughts on this! I hope it wasn't too dark. Thanks for reading!**


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